


baby duckling

by arcadianwriter (noxstories)



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Symbolism, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, canon complaint, character death referenced, no beta we die like dream in the next fic i'm writing, story typical violence, this isn't abt content creators it's abt their characters!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:20:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28205982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxstories/pseuds/arcadianwriter
Summary: Dream builds a home when he makes the Dream SMP.Years later, Dream builds a house.Both of them turn out the same.[Or, The Author finds angst in the funniest of bits, and gives c! Dream a tragic motivation.]
Relationships: No romantic relationships!! - Relationship
Comments: 13
Kudos: 300





	baby duckling

Dream loves his server.

Of course he does. He’s built it from the ground up, inviting new people, creating new builds, making friends, and he’s never been happier. Everything is going almost perfectly, really - there are some slip ups, in the form of a six foot three British child with a tendency to break the rules he’s set and another Brit that wants to sell drugs (against rule three, so it’s a no go), but there are always slip ups. Nothing is completely perfect, Dream knows this. How many times has he aimed for perfection and fallen short?

This time, he promises to be easier on himself. He doesn’t aim for perfection here. He’s aiming for happy. 

Things… take a turn for the worse quicker than he’d have liked. There’s a revolution - a declaration of independence - and suddenly his happy little family is fracturing, all thanks to L’Manburg. Well. He can’t blame all of L’Manburg. Tommy is just a kid - a soldier, nothing more. So are Tubbo and Fundy and Eret: he doesn’t count any of them as proper enemies to his server, though they are nuisances. No, the threat is Wilbur Soot; confident, optimistic, visionary Wilbur, who shapes his dream for a nation into something tangible, something real. He’s a more natural leader than Dream is, and it’s intimidating, to see what he inspires. And Dream knows that if he grants Wilbur’s request for independence, then the whole server will fall apart, move away from his careful nurturing.

So he does the only thing he knows, and declares war.

It’s not the same as the manhunts he’s been raised on. George and Sapnap are on his side, for one, and for another, things are a lot more brutal. Killing has come easy to him for a while now - he’d been born alongside death, it’s fitting to grow alongside it too - but it’s difficult to stare down a child and fight them, knowing that they are just as scared, if not more, than he is.

The war is brutal, the war is long. George has lost interest, Sapnap has a manic glint in his eyes that Dream doesn’t like. Alyssa and Callahan run away: the violence, they claim in a note, isn’t what they had wanted from the server. They’d wanted peace, and urge the reader of the note (they know it’s Dream, know Dream knows everything that happens on the server, he doesn’t know why they pretend otherwise) to end the war. To find a compromise.

Dream sobs bitterly for the first and last time in years. He’s lost more than two friends that night.

And things only get worse. He doesn’t know when he begins to spiral, but when Eret comes to him, hungry for power and craving peace, Dream strikes a deal like the devil: L’Manburg for the crown. Eret accepts. The curtains rise on the final control room, the players are in position - and Dream feels absolutely nothing when he murders Tommy in the room while the kid cries out in shock and betrayal. Just a numb sort of feeling: the distinct sensation of letting peace slip through his fingers, of his family getting further and further away from him.

Lives in the server are fickle things, never constant: someone can die a thousand times without it counting as a true death, someone else can die once and have it be true. Everyone has at least three lives; most die more, and it’s a roulette wheel to see whether the fates decide to take away a life when that happens. Over the years, Dream’s lost count of the times he’s died, on manhunts and in the wilderness: he’s yet to lose a real life. 

He takes away Tommy’s first life in the control room, and his second fucking life in their duel, and can only stand there silently when the kid drops dead again. Wilbur sobs on his knees, Tubbo screams his best friend’s name, Fundy is in shock. He’s never taken a real life before. George and Sapnap and Bad still have three lives, and he thinks they always will when it’s him killing them.

Why Tommy? Why had killing Tommy once taken away a life both times? Sapnap cracks a weak joke about them being parallels. Foils, of some sort. Dream half thinks he has a point.

Tommy comes back with a harder light in his eyes, but that spark of rebellion still in his grin. He trades the discs for L’Manburg’s independence, which Dream is forced to grant - on the condition that L’Manburg is still technically part of theDream SMP - and the war… is over.

Alyssa and Callahan stay gone. Dream wonders if they’d be proud of him. He doubts it.

Schlatt… is a surprise. That’s the most terrifying part: nothing on his server is supposed to be a surprise to him. Dream is supposed to know everything, and yes, maybe Schlatt isn’t necessarily a bad surprise - he shows up and is surprisingly docile, nothing like the crooked businessman Dream had heard about - but he panics, bans him mid-walk with Tommy. He doesn’t know how Schlatt had gotten in, doesn’t know who betrayed him and let him in, and he’s the one in control. How can he work on rebuilding the happy family they’d once had if new people are invited in without his consent?

...Everyone demands Schlatt back.

Dream caves in weeks, because he loves them, and because he loves them, Schlatt, now with ram horns and a cruel glint in his eyes, wrecks everything Dream has been working towards. With horror heavy in his heart, Dream watches Wilbur announce the election results; watches, numbly, as he and Tommy are chased out of the country they’d help to build. It’s painful to see - even more painful to stand by and do nothing as Schlatt destroys Manburg and the server until it’s unrecognisable as the place it had once been. There are thick clouds hanging over Dream SMP, and Dream, for the first time in his life, is helpless to clear them. 

He’s become an audience member of his own server, he knows this; but what can he do? Some small part of him that’s meaner than the rest hopes desperately that if he leaves them to this mess, and sweeps in at the last minute to save them, they’ll unite again. It’s a childish hope now, he knows: Manburg is under a dictatorship and Dream SMP’s neutrality is only going to distance them further, but he can do nothing but hope.

He gives Tommy his bow, because he wants them to be friends, he does: but when he sees Tommy next, there’s still that wild flame in his eyes that never seems to die. _Oh,_ Dream realises with a sad sort of detachment he’s growing used to, Tommy is never going to let them all reunite. He’s never going to let Dream take back the control that he needs. Somewhere, in the many months it’s been since the revolution and election, Tommy has taken over Wilbur’s role: he’s the leader, not in the literal sense, but in every sense that counts. Wilbur Soot is the literal leader of the Pogtopia revolution, yes, but Tommy Innit is the figurehead of rebellion and always has been. People admire him, more than they do Wilbur, who has become a loose cannon and so unstable that he’s built a room to blow up Manburg and end everything. 

It’s ingenious, and Dream allows himself to imagine a world without problems, without Manburg ruining everything. Imagines his server as his home again, and smiles wistfully.

The smile is carefully hidden behind his mask when he gives Wilbur the TNT to enact his plans, and is wiped clean at the festival.

Tubbo is killed; his blood mars the grounds of Manburg, and Dream feels it seep into his soul like ice. He hadn’t been invited to the festival - Schlatt despises him, and he despises Schlatt - but had thought it best to show up anyway. He wishes he hadn’t now. It’s like a performance: Technoblade kills Tubbo, Tommy screams out his best friend’s name, chaos erupts, and Dream watches in the wings.

He can’t do anything to help. Maybe this will teach them, he thinks childishly, maybe this will show them that being under my guidance was better.

The festival ends in bloodshed and death. Dream doesn’t feel surprised at this; he’d suspected this. He doesn’t really feel anything, he doesn’t cry, doesn't intervene. Instead, he observes, with that same detached feeling from before that is slowly becoming his new reality. 

He misses home more than ever.

Dream is about to cave and side with Pogtopia when Schlatt calls him in for a meeting. He’s on his last legs, and both of them know it. That doesn’t mean he’s not as sharp as a fiddle in their little discussion, where he brings out a certain book that Dream’s blood runs cold at the sight of and prompts him to side with Schlatt. This time, it’s _Dream_ making deals with the devil, and he hates it, hates the loss of power, control, but tells himself at the end of the day that everything will be worth it. He shakes Schlatt’s hand, teeth gritted behind his mask, and plots the downfall of every faction and the rise of Dream SMP again; whole, unbroken, divisions forgotten. 

In all of this, of course, he’s forgotten one key factor that makes all of this impossible; Tommy, with his heart of steel and the courage of a lion. Tommy and Tubbo rebuild L’Manburg after Schlatt and Wilbur, and L’Manburg begins to get back on its legs again. Dream feels something other than detached loneliness for the first time in months; he feels panicked. If L’Manburg rebuilds, remains independent, then Dream’s desperate, desperate hopes for a family and home will be shattered entirely.

...So he gets involved, by doing what he does best: pulling the puppet strings.

Except things start going wrong again. The puppets aren’t as compliant as they should be, and Tommy’s hacking his strings off every second of every day - he blows up George’s house and Dream uses it as a halfhearted excuse to get Tommy exiled. And then Tommy does something stupid, stupid with anger and arrogance.

He mentions Spirit, and Dream’s entire world stops for a moment.

Because he cares about Spirit. Of course he does. Even as a child, he’d been told his heart was too big - _“if you’re not careful, it’ll be the death of you one day,”_ people had told him with a chuckle. He’d never quite understood that until now, being made to cut down the obsidian block wall around L’Manburg while Tommy berates him in the background. His hands shake, his lip is bleeding from how hard he’s gnawing on it, but he snaps. 

Things blur slightly in his anger. He spits out heated words about not caring for anyone or anything while Spirit’s loss hangs heavy on his shoulders along with the weight of the world - forget Tommy being Theseus, Dream at that moment feels like Atlas, and the world is crushing him underneath it, slowly but surely. He yells for the first time in years, makes rash statements he regrets later, and gives Tubbo an ultimatum. Before the words even leave his mouth, he knows exactly what Tubbo will do. 

Tubbo exiles Tommy. Dream smiles. It’s empty. But he’s one step closer to reuniting everyone. His home will finally be back. God, he’s missed it, more than anything.

The one thing he has left to do is convince Tommy to behave better. They’ve started off on rough footing - they’ve been enemies for years, and Dream _had_ just exiled him. But Dream is confident they can be friends. Sure, he takes and destroys Tommy’s things every day, convinces him that L’Manburg is better off without his presence, wrecks his beach plans so that nobody shows up, but those are _necessary_ evils. The road to heaven is paved with good intentions, or whatever the phrase is. 

He sends Ghostbur out into the snow to die again. Dream has no lost love for Wilbur Soot, alive or dead. He’s always been more trouble than he’s been worth, and had been the one who started off this fracture in Dream’s family. He can’t ever forgive Wilbur for that.

But he and Tommy are getting on better and better, he’s sure of it. Tommy is becoming more cooperative, he’s warming up to Dream, and Dream is optimistic that within a few short months, Tommy will be obedient enough that he can return to L’Manburg (which is basically Dream SMP land now, despite having a President) and everyone can befriend each other. George and Sapnap will forgive him, too. They’ll love him again. Everyone will. Once they all see how much he loves and cares for them all, how he’s done all of this for them, they’ll forgive and love him in turn.

And then Tommy escapes, and everything goes to shit again. Exhausted and furious, an ache in his heart growing with every step, Dream loses traces of the kid in a forest, and screams out in frustration. He takes his anger out on mobs at night, and if he wakes up the next morning half dead from cold and surrounded by dead mobs, then he has nobody on his side to mention it to.

He really doesn’t have anyone on his side. It’s a surprisingly unsurprising realisation that takes him an unsurprisingly surprising time to figure out. Oh, sure, he has Punz, who he pays, and Sam, who he pays, and Techno, who lies to him about Tommy’s whereabouts, and Puffy, who he barely sees-

(For a moment, he thinks wistfully of her laugh and her nickname for him. _Baby duckling_. It’s more fitting than he’d ever admit.)

-But none of them count. They’d turn against him in an instant - some of them already are. They have other loyalties and interests. Dream? Dream has three interests: bringing the server together, tracking Tommy, and the discs.

(They keep him awake at night. He can’t sleep anymore for thinking about them. They burn in his head; fizzle there, like they’ll explode in real life if he stops thinking about them.)

(They’ll be the death of him, one day. He knows this.)

They all link to his yearning, aching, longing for home, a home that’s been gone for far too long. He misses it, if he allows himself to reflect. Home has never been a _place_ for him: though if he had to have a place as a home, a younger, gentler version of him from before would have said the Community House without hesitation. But the Community House is abandoned and long past its use now. Dream can’t help but feel it’s fitting.

“You’re not homeless, are you Dream?” Techno jibes only a day or so later, and Dream stiffens like he’s been slapped, faltering for a fraction of a moment.

“I’m not _homeless,"_ he responds with a scoff, all hard edges and defensiveness, " what the hell is _wrong_ with you?”

Techno cottons on to how much this gets under his skin, because somehow his rival understands him better than anyone else. Dream flees Techno's base to the sounds of mockery and to humiliation licking up his body like flames, and decides to build a house, just to prove Techno wrong. He has a house. He has a place to call home. He-

  
  


He blows his home up within half an hour when things start going wrong too quickly and when he doesn’t understand why he can’t fix it all.

He doesn’t understand why he’s crying either, but there’s nobody around but the icy winds to witness it.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoyed!! sorry if it's incoherent - i wrote this in two hours and it's 2am :') i'm super tired, but i had to write this!!! character dream is SO interesting to me and i wish more people noticed how sad his character actually is in terms of character arcs/development over the series. i'll no doubt end up writing another one of these LMAO
> 
> pls like + comment if you enjoyed!! ily all <3


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